Even the latter is pretty awful. "Got XYZ working" tells you nothing about the bug that was fixed, nor why the broken feature was in the branch in the first place.

People who work with source control would do really well to watch how the kernel community approaches this. Commits add new features or fix bugs. They don't add broken crap to the mainline. You can version that if you want, but do it on your own branch and don't pollute the community's history with it.